Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show brings us the coolest new gadgets, the must-haves, and the almost-theres. It’s one of the most exciting times for developers and buyers alike, and everyone has their favorites. We’ve detailed what we thought was the coolest gear to come out of this year’s show:

Laptops

Most gamers, geeks and gearheads got started by falling in love with their first home computer. This affection extends to laptops, the not-so-new norm for personal computing, and it’s not uncommon to find consumers arguing over specs and comparing minutiae in the hopes of getting the absolute perfect piece of equipment to run their favorite games and software.

For Gaming: The Razer Blade Stealth really blew away the competition this year with their first major success making an ultraportable laptop with heavy-duty desktop visual capabilities. At 2.75 pounds, including its 12.5 inch, 3184 x 2160 px resolution screen, and powered by a Skylake Intel Core i7, the machine does have to be paired with the Core, the company’s external graphics bay to really perform with games like Fallout 4. However, with a $999 price point, that can be forgiven.

For Work: If you’re involved in a large enterprise, the new HP EliteBook Folio G1 will be your jam this year. Being referred to as the “Macbook for Professionals,” as to its superior security, Intel vPro and TPM capabilities. This is, in our opinion, the most successful rendition of the new trend of “enterprise capable laptops that look like the ones you buy for yourself.”

Gaming Gear

We do have to say that laptops and gaming gear definitely tie as our favorite categories, mainly because we class laptops as, essentially, gaming gear that also enables the user to do other stuff too. With the rising popularity of virtual reality combining with the industry’s ability to actually produce believable graphics for this trend, CES 2016 may have been one of the most exciting years to date for the gaming community.

This year, we have two favorites. The first is the HTC Vive’s Chaperone, an innovative new system that incorporates the user’s surroundings to make for a safe an ultra dynamic gameplay. Let’s just start this off by saying we already love the HTC Vive system as a whole – it may be the coolest thing we’ve seen in awhile. The best way we can explain is to show you their promotional video:

Did they just hint at a virtual reality Portal game at 0:53?? Because I’m willing to bet they did (not in small part because of their partnership with Valve, but seriously, we are so excited. Our other favorite is the Recon Empire EVS. This is a bit different, in that it’s not really meant for home game play – it’s a helmet you wear while playing paintball to turn it into a FPS you can play with your friends. I repeat, it’s a helmet for actually shooting people with.

(Photo credit: Engadget)

This lovely addition to the paintballing community not only adds an added gaming element with Recon’s impressive head’s-up display system, but also allows users to attach GoPro cameras to their guns, meaning they can shoot around corners. Like superheroes – or supervillains.

Products That Makes Us Say “The Future is Now”

Engadget explained the EHang 184 as “a drone that carries people.” We’re pretty sure that means it’s a helicopter or personal plane, but we’re not complaining – yes, there was a personal helicopter demoed at CES. It goes 60 mph and can reach 11,000 feet. Passengers program where they want to go, get in, and then they’re taken there – simple as that. While it’s still being tested for safety, the website indicates that it’s been designed with motor redundancy – and, as a perk, it’s 100% green.

(Photo credit: NBC News)

Once you’re done flying around in your personal low-flying aircraft – which we’re just going to go ahead and said air car, like in the Jetsons – you can come home to a nice meal stored in your smart refrigerator, the Samsung Family Hub. Smart refrigerators aren’t really that new, but the Hub brings it to a new level and adds a beautiful design we haven’t seen before in home appliances. While we aren’t sure why you’d need to access the internet from your refrigerator just yet, we also weren’t sure why people would want to send short text messages instead of just calling 20 years ago – we’re going to leave this one to the experts.

(Photo credit: PCMag)

The refrigerator has a display that also allows an improved level of interaction, with LED “labels” you can drag and drop over your food, which is visible through the glass door. You can even buy things straight from the screen, which is where the real money flowing into Samsung’s pockets will come from. I guess this is the end of gross leftovers, or hiding that uneaten cake for later…

CES 2016 Blew Our Minds

In closing, let us just say that CES 2016 had a lot of incredible new devices, software and hardware on display. From virtual reality integrating more seamlessly into our everyday lives, to refrigerators that make storing guilty food much more difficult, we’re excited to see what the future holds for technology.

The main takeaway that we were given is that the era of information and technology being siloed away from other aspects of our lives is ending. If you watched the video of the Vive above, you’ll notice that one of the examples is a medical professional experimenting with various procedures. It doesn’t take a sergeant to guess what applications the Recon Empire may have on military operations. And what happens when Jillian Michaels appears on your smart refrigerator as punishment when you grab that ice cream?

Technology is now, more than ever, being indelibly woven into the very fabric of our lives.

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Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.
However, EU users have to agree to the new terms of service in order to continue using Facebook, Recode point out, after asking Facebook how the worldwide experience differs from the one being shown in Europe.
Elsewhere in the world, users who dismiss the prompt twice will be automatically opted in.
But before you close that window too quickly, you may want to take a look at what Facebook is asking.
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
Review Your Privacy Settings
Posted by Facebook on Wednesday, May 23, 2018
In the new prompt, which appears when you visit News Feed, Facebook will allow you to review details about advertising, facial recognition, and the information you’ve chosen to share on your profile.
For example, you may no longer feel comfortable having your religion, political views or relationship information exposed, and the new experience will allow you to change those settings.
As you continue reviewing your information, each screen will walk you through what data is collected and how it’s used, allowing you to make better decisions about Facebook’s use of your data.
Specially, Facebook says the feature will include the following information:
How it uses data from partners to show more relevant advertising
Political, religious, and relationship information you’ve chosen to include on your profile
How it uses face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy
Updates to its terms of service and data policy (that were announced in April)
If you’ve already disabled some of these settings, you won’t be shown that information or encouraged to turn the features back on.
After you adjust your settings, the changes go into effect immediately and you can adjust them again at any time from Settings or Privacy Shortcuts, the company says.
Though the GDPR is aimed at protecting user data in the EU, Facebook has come under fire for its breach of trust with its user base due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where data was hijacked from 87 million users without their consent. The company is now revisiting a lot of its user data privacy practices and making changes as result of both that and GDPR’s requirements.
The experience will start popping up on Facebook this week.
... Read More

Created to help app developers find and fix bugs more efficiently, Sentry announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series B led by returning investors NEA and Accel. Both firms participated in Sentry’s Series A round two years ago.
Co-founder and CEO David Cramer tells TechCrunch that the new round puts Sentry’s post-money valuation at around $100 million. The company recently launched Sentry 9, which, like its other software, is open source. Sentry 9 lets app developers integrate error remediation into their workflows by automatically notifying the developers responsible for that part of the code, letting them filter by environment to hone in on the issue, and manage collaboration among different teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to fix bugs from “five hours to five minutes,” Sentry claims.
The company will “double down on developers and their adjacent roles,” in particular product teams, Cramer says. Next in the pipeline is tools that will answer more in-depth questions related to app performance management.
“Today we answer ‘this specific thing is broken, why?’ Next we’ll expand that into deeper insights whether it’s ‘these sets of things are broken for the same reason’ as well as exploring non-errors. For example, if you deploy an update to your product and traffic to your sign-up form goes to zero that’s pretty serious, even if you’re not generating errors,” Cramer says.
Sentry’s technology originated as an internal tool for exception logging in Djana applications while its founders, Chris Jennings and Cramer, were working at Disqus. After they open-sourced it, the software quickly expanded into more programming languages. Sentry launched a hosted service in 2012 to answer demand. It now claims to have 9,000 paying customers (including Airbnb, Dropbox, PayPal, Twitter and Uber), be used by 500,000 engineers and process more than 360 billion errors a year.
In a press statement, Accel partner Dan Levine said “Sentry’s growth is a testament to the now-universal truth that app users everywhere expect a flawless experience free of bugs and crashes. Poor user experience kills companies. In order to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, product teams need to know that customers will never leave because of a broken app update. Sentry lets every developer build software that is functionally error-free.”
... Read More

Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.
However, EU users have to agree to the new terms of service in order to continue using Facebook, Recode point out, after asking Facebook how the worldwide experience differs from the one being shown in Europe.
Elsewhere in the world, users who dismiss the prompt twice will be automatically opted in.
But before you close that window too quickly, you may want to take a look at what Facebook is asking.
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v3.0'; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
Review Your Privacy Settings
Posted by Facebook on Wednesday, May 23, 2018
In the new prompt, which appears when you visit News Feed, Facebook will allow you to review details about advertising, facial recognition, and the information you’ve chosen to share on your profile.
For example, you may no longer feel comfortable having your religion, political views or relationship information exposed, and the new experience will allow you to change those settings.
As you continue reviewing your information, each screen will walk you through what data is collected and how it’s used, allowing you to make better decisions about Facebook’s use of your data.
Specially, Facebook says the feature will include the following information:
How it uses data from partners to show more relevant advertising
Political, religious, and relationship information you’ve chosen to include on your profile
How it uses face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy
Updates to its terms of service and data policy (that were announced in April)
If you’ve already disabled some of these settings, you won’t be shown that information or encouraged to turn the features back on.
After you adjust your settings, the changes go into effect immediately and you can adjust them again at any time from Settings or Privacy Shortcuts, the company says.
Though the GDPR is aimed at protecting user data in the EU, Facebook has come under fire for its breach of trust with its user base due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where data was hijacked from 87 million users without their consent. The company is now revisiting a lot of its user data privacy practices and making changes as result of both that and GDPR’s requirements.
The experience will start popping up on Facebook this week.
... Read More

Created to help app developers find and fix bugs more efficiently, Sentry announced today that it has raised a $16 million Series B led by returning investors NEA and Accel. Both firms participated in Sentry’s Series A round two years ago.
Co-founder and CEO David Cramer tells TechCrunch that the new round puts Sentry’s post-money valuation at around $100 million. The company recently launched Sentry 9, which, like its other software, is open source. Sentry 9 lets app developers integrate error remediation into their workflows by automatically notifying the developers responsible for that part of the code, letting them filter by environment to hone in on the issue, and manage collaboration among different teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to fix bugs from “five hours to five minutes,” Sentry claims.
The company will “double down on developers and their adjacent roles,” in particular product teams, Cramer says. Next in the pipeline is tools that will answer more in-depth questions related to app performance management.
“Today we answer ‘this specific thing is broken, why?’ Next we’ll expand that into deeper insights whether it’s ‘these sets of things are broken for the same reason’ as well as exploring non-errors. For example, if you deploy an update to your product and traffic to your sign-up form goes to zero that’s pretty serious, even if you’re not generating errors,” Cramer says.
Sentry’s technology originated as an internal tool for exception logging in Djana applications while its founders, Chris Jennings and Cramer, were working at Disqus. After they open-sourced it, the software quickly expanded into more programming languages. Sentry launched a hosted service in 2012 to answer demand. It now claims to have 9,000 paying customers (including Airbnb, Dropbox, PayPal, Twitter and Uber), be used by 500,000 engineers and process more than 360 billion errors a year.
In a press statement, Accel partner Dan Levine said “Sentry’s growth is a testament to the now-universal truth that app users everywhere expect a flawless experience free of bugs and crashes. Poor user experience kills companies. In order to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, product teams need to know that customers will never leave because of a broken app update. Sentry lets every developer build software that is functionally error-free.”
... Read More